Is Consciousness Fundamental? – Ed Kelly – Transcript

Ed Kelly Interview

Summary:

Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people and about spiritual topics, consciousness and the like. We’ve done about 630 of them now. If this is new to you, and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to BatGap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P and look under the past interviews’ menu. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. If you appreciate it and would like to support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the website. There’s also a donation page that explains some alternatives to PayPal. My guest today is Edward F. Kelly. Edward is currently a professor in the Division of Perceptual Studies. DOPS is the acronym for that at the University of Virginia, where Bruce Greyson and Jim Tucker also work today. They’re in the same department I think, and I’ve interviewed both of them in the past year. He received his PhD in Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Science from Harvard in 1971 and spent the next 15-plus years working mainly in parapsychology, initially at JB Rhine’s Institute for parapsychology, then for 10 years through the Department of Electrical Engineering at Duke and finally through a private research institute in Chapel Hill. Between 1988 and 2002, he worked with a large neuroscience group at UNC Chapel Hill mainly carrying out EEG and fMRI studies of human somatosensory cortical adaptation to natural tactile stimuli. He returned full time to Psychical Research in 2002, serving as lead author of Irreducible Mind, 2007, Beyond Physicalism, 2015 and Consciousness Unbound, 2021. All published by Rowman and Littlefield. He is now returning to his central long term research interest, application of modern functional neuro imaging methods to intensive psycho physiological studies of psi, psychic phenomenon, and ASCs in exceptional subjects. I might as well start by asking you what ASCs are because I forget.

Ed Kelly: Altered states of consciousness

The Inversion Toward Idealism

Rick Archer: Altered states of consciousness. Okay, good. I said to you earlier, before we started that I’d start by asking you to give the elevator talk of what you’re all about. Did that little bio kind of cover it or is there something you want to add to that that’s of importance to start out with, which we’ll then unpack as we go along?

Ed Kelly: Well, that kind of gets the gist of it. Let me just say that I first got started in this direction as a graduate student when I first encountered the scientific literature on parapsychology, both spontaneous cases and experimental studies. I quickly realized that something was going on here, if it’s for real, that is not expected in light of our conventional ways of thinking about things. That to me that made it interesting because, hey, there’s opportunity for growth here. That’s why I started work right out of graduate school at the Rhine Parapsychology lab in Durham, North Carolina. But like most people who come into the field from a scientific point of view, I really kind of hoped at the time that there’d be some little adjustment to be made in our worldview, somewhere that would accommodate this stuff, and it would all kind of fall naturally into place. The entire history of my career is becoming less and less confident of that. In fact, I now think that psi phenomena, I mean, they’re certainly of interest in certain ways, but I think their real importance is in pointing in the direction that we have to go theoretically. We need to overhaul our basic worldview, remaining in touch with science, but where I think we’re getting to is basically inverting it, like Mike Grober, and his book. Everything’s Upside Down. I think what I’ve gotten to over the last 50 years is essentially the opposite of where I started, which was conventional physicalism, and I think once you abandon that, and you have to, because of phenomena such as psi phenomena, there’s really no safe stopping place short of what amounts to its opposite, some kind of an idealism, in which mind and consciousness are what’s really fundamental. That’s the long and short of it. Let me just wave my books, if I may.

Rick Archer: Sure. Yeah, wave. I’ll link to them also on your BatGap page.

Ed Kelly: There’s the first one Irreducible Mind. That came out in 2007. The subtitle is ‘Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century’, and in that one, we basically tried to assemble in one place a lot of the many kinds of evidence that are difficult or impossible to explain in conventional physicalist terms. We can go into this in more detail as we go along. Then the next one was our first attempt to really seriously get beyond a showing that physicalism is not so hot and trying to figure out what might take its place. This one is called Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality. In that one, we canvassed almost a dozen ancient and modern philosophical systems or conceptual frameworks that take seriously the kinds of phenomena that we had assembled in Irreducible Mind and puts forth some kind of a conceptual framework that might help us to understand them better. Then the most recent one which came out last spring is Consciousness Unbound, Liberating Mind from the Tyranny of Materialism. See now we’re starting to feel pretty confident about it all. We really wanted to stick a thumb in the eye of the physicalist opposition. That’s the reason for that carefully considered subtitle.

Rick Archer: In case people didn’t notice when you hold them up these books would make good doorstops. They’re quite voluminous. When you say we, in talking about them, you’re referring to a lot of collaborators who wrote various chapters, right?

Ed Kelly: Yeah, this began as a project initiated at Esalen by Mike Murphy, co-founder of Esalen. Mike, I mean, he’s an extraordinary guy, prodigious reader. He was well aware that if physicalism is correct, then there can’t be any such thing as post-mortem survival. But he was also aware that people here and there around the planet are actually doing research that purports to be generating evidence supportive of that possibility. For example, the work that my colleagues, Jim Tucker and Bruce Greyson, do at DOPS. Jim works on cases of the reincarnation type, Bruce, mainly on near death experiences. We’ll probably get back to the latter in particular, a little bit later. I have a special interest there. Mike convened a working group to examine the evidence for survival. He has a kind of Think Tank embedded within Esalen. It’s called the Center for Theory and Research. There he can pursue his many personal intellectual interests with a special allowance that he gets for that purpose from Esalen. He’s convened hundreds of these things over the years, but this one, it turns out, went on for about 20 years, in the course of producing these books. The story there is basically physicalism, what is that? Well, that’s the name of a modern kind of ascetic, philosophical descendant of the materialism of previous centuries. We’re all familiar with this stuff. We grew up with it probably. Certainly, when I was in elementary and middle and high school and all that sort of thing. This is what we were fed every day and it was still going strong at the time I was in graduate school. It says basically that all facts are determined in the end by physical facts alone. The reason for that is that reality consists at bottom of some little elf playing around in fields of force in accordance with mathematical laws, and everything else has to be built out of that elementary stuff, whatever it is. It used to be atoms and then subatomic particles. One of the things we should note about this right away is that the physics on which physicalism is based is that of the late 19th century and it itself does not take into account the huge things that have happened. I mean, the foundations of physics have shifted dramatically over the past century, in ways that impact this conversation. Nevertheless, when I was in graduate school, this was what everybody assumed was the case. That among all the things that have to get manufactured out of the basic stuff, there is our minds and consciousness, assumed to be manufactured by physiological processes going on in our brains. The idea is that corresponding to every thought and so on, there’s some kind of a pattern of electrical activity in your brain that either accompanies that or is identical with it or generates it, or something of that sort. There’s huge literature on these things. But to get right down to the basics of the situation, everybody agrees that there are normally strong correlations between physical events in brains and events in mind and consciousness. So, if you get hit hard enough on the head or ingest a psychedelic or grow a certain kind of brain cancer or something, mental things change. The physical causation of the mental is certainly affect. Well, what about the other? I mean, I decide to raise my hand and up it goes. Isn’t that mental causation evenly? That’s what seems to be. Well, the physical answer to that is that you simply misunderstood what’s really happening because that idea or intention that you formed to raise your hand is really nothing more than a pattern of physical activity in your brain. Physical causes physical, no problem. That’s very glib. But it’s very hard to disprove. What we really had to do at the beginning of this project, was to try to assemble in one place a lot of evidence, demonstrating the existence of things that people can do that cannot be explained by activity of the brain alone.

Ed Kelly: Now, first and foremost, any list of that sort will be psychic phenomena. That’s what makes them interesting in the first place, that they seem virtually by definition to be beyond explanation by conventional means. A person is embedded in his world, and yet information comes in or it goes out into the environment across some kind of a barrier, that if conventional ideas were correct just couldn’t happen. For example, on an ESP test, the target is maybe in the next room, might be 5000 miles away, might be up at the moon even, or might not even have been selected yet, might not get selected until tomorrow afternoon. There would seem to be decisive physical barriers there that should prevent success. Yet, people succeed in these tasks. Let me just say without going further into it, this is a big literature. I mean, there are hundreds of thousands of pages of reports of spontaneous cases, reports of thousands of experiments carried out in conventional ways. The collective impact of all that, in my estimation, is that you can just take it to the bank that these phenomena exist as facts of nature, and our science is going to have to expand somehow to let us understand them. Explain how they can have post-mortem survival, let me just mentioned in passing is kind of a special sub problem within that general field. There’s a huge argument that’s raised for 150 years or so now as to whether there really is post-mortem survival, or whether all the apparent evidence for survival might be explained by psi-like interactions among only living persons, or between such persons in their environments and that’s a long story. We don’t need to go into it, because the plain fact is that both horns of that dilemma are equally fatal to conventional physicalism. We don’t have to have an answer to that question, fortunately, because, I mean, it’s remarkable there. You’ve got very well-informed smart people on both sides of that issue. I personally lean towards survival at this point, partly because of Irreducible Mind and I’ll try to get back to that in a moment.

Rick Archer: By post-mortem survival you mean reincarnation, for instance, or perhaps near-death experiences where a person is under deep anesthesia, and yet they’re watching the operating room from the ceiling or something and obviously, that shouldn’t be able to happen, but there’s a lot of evidence for that. Any other examples of post-mortem?

Evidence Beyond Conventional Physicalism

Ed Kelly: Post-Mortem survival basically means persistence, for some unknown period of time of mind and consciousness and personality after the death of the body. Other kinds of evidence include things like crisis apparitions. In the old days, a guy would be over India, in the British Army, and his sister would hear him come into the kitchen as she’s doing something she turns around and looks at him. He seems to be really there, full-fledged, solid three-dimensional person, with a wound in his head, and then he disappears, maybe passing through the wall. or something of that sort. Then two weeks later, the letter or telegram or something comes from India, confirming the fact that he was killed in that way. Then there’s all the literature of mediumship some of which I have to tell you is really quite hair raising. For example, William James, one of my heroes in the world of psychology, American psychologist and philosopher, encountered a woman named Mrs. Piper near the end of the 19th century, and she was one of the great classical mediums who convinced James that she somehow had access to information about his family, that she had no normal way of having acquired. He worked with her and people who worked with her for many years. In his last published report, he reiterated that Mrs. Piper had convinced him beyond all doubt that what we now call psi phenomena are possible. She was what he called his one white crow. If you have a proposition that all crows are black, the existence of a single white crow is sufficient to refute that proposition. She played that role for him in regard to ESP. But a lot of psychologists and neuroscientists and probably philosophers of mind even still like to think that this Parapsychology stuff is just one little sort of peculiar anomaly. Maybe we can just kind of put it in the corner, isolate it, quarantine it, and everything else will be okay. Well, the rest of Irreducible Mind went toward making clear that there are lots of other things that are about equally troublesome for conventional physicalism. For example, we’ve got chapters on things like some of the special properties of human memory, big chapter by my wife, Emily, on extreme examples of psychophysical influence. These include things like stigmata, where people who are intense believers in Christianity are imagining the crucifixion and develop wounds corresponding to what they believe were the wounds actually inflicted on Jesus. They also include things like hypnotic blisters of a particular shape. Jeunet, for example, would touch a patient with a poker that was actually cold but terminated in a star shape, saying that, okay, I’m going to burn you now with this hot poker and touches the skin. And lo and behold, a star shape, blister appeared. Now we know how a star shaped blister would appear. If the poker were actually red hot, but not sort of going in the other direction, that is from having an image of a red-hot poker that causes a correspondingly shaped blister to arise. There are a bunch of other phenomena of that sort. Extreme resistance to pain, for example. Surgeries conducted in India under hypnosis. We can return to any of these that people want to hear more about.

Post-Mortem survival basically means persistence, for some unknown period of time of mind and consciousness and personality after the death of the body.

Rick Archer: Some of these as you’re mentioning them sound to me like things physicalists could dismiss as being physical such as the poker thing because you don’t need to believe in transcendent consciousness or mind or anything. You can just think that, well, it’s some kind of psychosomatic suggestion thing that the brain does and causes that effect on the skin. But others that you’ve mentioned, couldn’t be explained or away so easily.

Ed Kelly: We sort of lined them up in order from the most general and potentially subject to that kind of explanation to ones that strain it increasingly as they become more specific and extreme in character. Well, let me go back to the pain thing for a moment. Esdale reports of one patient, I inserted the knife at the corner of his mouth, drew it to his ear, across to the eye, peeled back the skin. It goes on and on like this for a few revolting paragraphs and then ends with a comment that the patient occasionally made a slight moan.

Rick Archer: He was doing some legitimate surgery.

Ed Kelly: Yes, actual surgery. This is just pre anesthesia. He did hundreds of these things, and we give reasons why it’s not plausible to believe that a conventional physicalist explanation for these things can work.

Rick Archer: I saw an article not too long ago about a young girl who for some reason, couldn’t feel pain. She was born without that capability. They had to be very careful because she was always injuring herself because she didn’t know she was injuring. Someone might argue that, well, maybe if there could be a permanent condition like that a temporary condition could also kick in for ordinary people.

Ed Kelly: I think it would be easily possible to rule that out now. We’re doing surgeries.

Rick Archer: I’m just playing devil’s advocate a little bit.

Ed Kelly: That’s certainly fair. It gets more complicated, by the way, when the effect of a vivid imagination is not on one’s own body, but somebody else’s.

Rick Archer: There you go.

Psychophysical Effects and Maternal Impressions

Ed Kelly: There’s a whole class of cases called maternal impression cases, and there’s something on the order of 100 of these. Ian Stevenson documented a mob of them in his book Reincarnation and Biology. These are many cases in which a pregnant woman experiences some ghastly scenario that totally horrifies her and then her child is born some months later a corresponding defect, seeing a limb amputated. or something of that sort. Again, it’s particularly interesting because a number of these were reported in the 19th century, when physicians and neuroscientists believed that the fetus was sort of continuous with mother. But as it became clear that the fetus is somewhat independent of the mother, the frequency of these reports started to go down, even though there are a few even well into the 20th century. This is an example of how what’s regarded is correct theoretically shapes what people are able to study and report in the scientific literature. Anyway, let’s go on a bit further. Next chapter was about out-of-body and near-death experiences. Let me just say probably adding to what you’ve already heard from Bruce or pull me in on one aspect of that, to me, the most interesting class of cases is those of the type you mentioned, those occurring under extreme physiological conditions, such as deep general anesthesia and/or cardiac arrest. The reason is that in these cases, well, let me go back a step. There is a very strong consensus in contemporary neuroscience as to what the necessary conditions are for having any kind of a conscious experience. They in particular involve having a brain that at the moment, is capable of generating and coordinating neuro electric rhythms, brainwaves, as you’ve heard, in the say, eight to 50 or 60 Hertz range, coordinating those over large territories of the brain. But those conditions are specifically abolished both by general anesthesia and by cardiac arrest, especially in cardiac arrest, which is an absolutely brutal physiological event. The EEG flatlines within 20 or 30 seconds and not long after that, neurons become unable to fire, which is the ultimate physical basis for any kind of communication among areas of the brain. And yet, people are not only having experiences but having the most intense and transformative experiences of their lives. How do we know that? Because they report things that go on during the time of apparent unconsciousness. There are a number of cases of this sort. You’ve probably heard about Eben Alexander.

Rick Archer: I’ve interviewed him. I’ve interviewed at least a dozen people who’ve had this kind of experience.

Near-Death Experiences Under Cardiac Arrest

Ed Kelly: Pam Reynolds is another good case of that sort and Anita Moorjani of that sort. We needn’t to go into the attempts of physicalists to evade the force of this argument, but it really holds together in my opinion. I’ve seen nothing to contradict it. What it shows is that not only consciousness, but quite extreme forms of consciousness are possible under conditions where virtually all neuroscientists don’t think anything of that sort could possibly happen. Let me just add to this, I personally guess that this will become the area of psychical research that finally breaks down the resistance of the scientific establishment to the kind of picture that we’re putting forward here. The idea that consciousness can operate separately from the brain. This is a big part of why I personally have been moved in the direction of accepting the reality of survival as well as psi phenomena. We have additional chapters in Irreducible Mind. One is about genius, creativity. Let me just say there that creativity is a subject of course that has received a fair amount of attention from psychologists, not nearly as much as it should, in my opinion, and not the kind of attention it really needs, but at least there has been some. Yet, if you look around, you find cases, for example, of the sort of the Indian mathematician Ramanujan, the properties of which just totally beggar the conceptual apparatus available to psychology at present to try to understand. This guy was just off the charts, fantastic stuff going on with him all the time. Regrettably, his mentor, the British mathematician, can’t think of his name at the moment, was not at all interested in these things. He was the master of proof whereas Ramanujan himself was the sort of Master of Creative discovery.

Rick Archer: I just want to interject here that he lived a normal life and just was gifted with these capabilities. But there have been people who have had brain injuries, for instance, who suddenly acquired the ability to be a improvisational jazz pianist or something who had never studied piano. I mean things like that happen, right?

Ed Kelly: There are lots of those things. We touch upon some of these. Another interesting one is savant.

Rick Archer: Like Rain Man, that kind of thing?

Ed Kelly: Yeah, that kind of thing. Let me just tell you about one that’s just startling. Oliver Sacks in his book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He’s got a chapter in a book called The Twins. These are autistic savants. Two kids, they were twins who could not add and subtract single digit numbers reliably. Against that background he’s chatting with them one day, and he knocked a box of matches on the floor. And the two of them instantly said 111 373737. At the moment, he took the trouble to count the matches, and there were 111 of. But it was only later on, that he caught on to what the 373737 was about, which was that they had factored that number into the product of two prime numbers, 3 and 37. That led him to inquire as to their familiarity with prime numbers. He got a big book of tables, prime numbers, and he started this game with them where they would exchange prime numbers. They gave bigger and bigger ones. They quickly exhausted his book of numbers, which only went out to about 12 digits or something like that. Eventually, these kids, these little kids who couldn’t add and subtract single digit numbers were producing 20-digit prime numbers that we need supercomputers to calculate. That’s pretty astonishing. More generally, I think what is totally unexplainable in conventional terms is the kind of speed, precision, vividness of the kinds of experience that commonly accompany high forms of genius. There’s a vast literature about these things and the experiences the various acknowledged historical geniuses had in the course of producing some of their great works of art or music or whatever.

Rick Archer: Now in this area, a physicalist might say, okay, the brain has marvelous capabilities. Isn’t that great? And maybe, somehow these savants and so on are people who’ve had certain brain injuries. Those capabilities get unlocked in some way we don’t understand. But that doesn’t imply any kind of transcendent consciousness or mind independent of the body. But I think you would probably say, and I would too that, the brain is more of a filter of consciousness than a creator of it, and that certain conditions can cause its filtering ability to diminish, and then all kinds of things can come through and begin to be experienced, which ordinarily can’t be.

Ed Kelly: Yeah, that’s exactly the way we take it. We also point out that the only semi plausible physicalist explanation for some of this stuff requires something that almost certainly does not happen. There’s a lot of theory about the brain as a computer and that sort of thing. The basic story is the only way you can get more logical depth and precision out of the brain is to use more of it for any particular task. But we don’t actually see that in cases where these sorts of things are going on. There are also well-known cases. The idea is that a savant, for example, he’s using all of his brain to calculate prime numbers. But there are also historical cases of geniuses who are also, I mean, they’re polymaths and perfectly, fully functioning human beings in all other regards. Savants are, the attempt is to interpret them as people who for some reason, have all their brains sort of focused on just doing this one or two things. But that won’t work in this larger context. Anyway, leaving that aside, you’re correct. Let me just say one more thing by way of background, the sort of models for Irreducible Mind is a book that was published in 1903 by F. W. H. Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research. It was called Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. And if you hadn’t included that, ‘and its survival of bodily death’, I think it would be more widely recognized as a great classic of psychology. I mean, this guy was a bonafide genius and this book is extraordinary. So, what we were really doing, was attempting to revisit Myers’ theory of personality in the light of a subsequent century of research on a number of the topics that he himself had studied and examined in his book. We used his procedure as kind of a model for the way we approach things. Now the last chapter, of the last topically oriented or substantively oriented chapter is on mystical experience, which now we’re getting close to the heart of BatGap’s interests. Let me just say for starters, that if creativity has been somewhat neglected by contemporary science, that neglect is a whole lot worse for the subject of mystical experience. Let me just add to the NDE discussion parenthetically, that to me, it seems clear that what’s going on and in these NDEs under extreme conditions is that people are having essentially mystical experiences, but under suboptimal conditions where you almost have to die in order to have the experience. Clearly, we’d like to find better ways of having lots more people have such experiences, because they are, Bruce, I’m sure talked about the remarkable transformative impact that NDEs have on lots of people, and that’s true of mystical experiences in general. They have the same characteristic that things go on that are ineffable in the sense that people can’t even describe exactly what happened because it was so enormous and complex in its way. Of course, there’s a huge literature on this stuff. It’s been ignored by contemporary science, basically, because of its obvious association with religion. Many scientists are just, I don’t know, this, the subject is just so terrifying to them that they can’t take mystical experiences seriously.

Ed Kelly: I think it’s a horrible gap in contemporary science, and if our work does nothing other than encourage more scientists to take the subject seriously, I think we’ll have done something worthwhile. There’s a lot of overlap, by the way, because there’s a lot in the literature of mysticism that people who are having the experiences start reporting all kinds of psi-like events going on, either immediately after or during. I’ve known people for example, I knew one guy, I met him when I was working at the Rhine Center many years ago. He had a very stereotypical kind of Kundalini experience, spontaneous thing in the shower one morning. Said he’d always been a slow reader, but for the next six months, he could read books, sort of glancing down one page and then glancing up the other and taking the whole thing in. That gradually faded away. He’s never had another experience since then as far as I know, but it opened him up in a way to these higher possibilities. Now, in the last chapter of Irreducible Mind, we took a first crack at trying to say, well, what kind of alternative to physicalism might enable us to understand some of these things. We sketched a kind of range of alternatives from a sort of improved version of dualism, to some kind of idealistic philosophy, and the one that we settled on because it was very prominent at Esalen at that time. We had a number of members in our group who had deep interest in it, including, by the way, some quantum physicists. This was Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics process philosophy. The last chapter of Irreducible Mind basically canvases, those, I think, shows clearly, that possibilities are on offer, which can do better than conventional physicalism at attempting to explain stuff, and which are in fact more consistent than physicalism itself with real modern physics. I believe we succeeded in that. For me as a psychologist, the main impact of Irreducible Mind is to support the Myers and James picture basically, of mind as somehow different from brain.

The Brain as Filter, Not Producer

Ed Kelly: They clearly work together very closely under normal conditions. But the better way of explaining the correlations is, as you said a few moments ago, to think of it as a filter that conditions in the brain permit expression of a mind and consciousness, which exists in some way separate from it. Now, going to have to get ahead of myself a little bit here. The next book Beyond Physicalism took us a lot further in that direction. We canvassed the whole mob of additional conceptual frameworks or theories or mystically informed religious philosophies that similarly set forth a conceptual framework that might allow us to understand things better and that took seriously the existence of various of the key phenomena. The key phenomena let’s say I think really are, going forward psi phenomena, number one, genius number two, and mystical experiences, number three. Those are the things we really want to understand, and clearly, having real understanding of a sort that might enable improved access to these things to something that would be very good for human needs individually, and collectively. I think we probably share the sense that a lot of the horrible and rapidly worsening problems of our civilization and our planet are ultimately traceable to this kind of physicalist worldview that drives so much of contemporary society, or consumer oriented, exploitative economic system, all that kind of stuff. But getting back to Myers and James, that picture you see, removes, what for me was the final logical obstacle to the possibility of post-mortem survival. If it’s true the mind and consciousness are products of brain activity, then there cannot be anything like post- mortem survival period. But if their picture is correct, that the correlations are accounted for by this working together under normal conditions, then the logical obstacle is removed, and the survival needs to be evaluated in terms of the evidence for it. I have to say, again, there’s a lot of evidence, some of it of very high quality, and nobody is really entitled to express the negative opinion about the subject who hasn’t taken the trouble to study some of that evidence.

Ed Kelly: Beyond Physicalism, let me just mention, we touched upon some of the traditional mystically informed religious philosophies, in particular Neo Platonism, which apart from its kind of bizarre cosmology and physics and all that thing, it’s an extremely sophisticated psychological system and philosophy, metaphysics. We have a chapter on Patanjali and yoga, and we have one on Abhinavagupta and Kashmir Shaivism, which seems to many people to be the sort of highest development of the whole Indian philosophical tradition. We had several chapters by physicists including both a quantum theorist and a cosmologist and string theory guy, and the guy who thinks a special interest in the long interaction between Jung and Pauli. Pauli was a Nobel Prize winning physicist, one of the early people in quantum theory and so on, who also was a very disturbed person who was a patient of one of Jung’s followers. They had an enormous, working interaction over decades, produced the voluminous correspondence. Anyway, this gentleman Harald Atmanspacher, who’s also a theoretical physicist, takes special interest in that. He’s got a chapter in our book. We also touched upon a couple of other representatives of the modern Western tradition, including Leibniz and Charles Sanders Pierce, and Whitehead again. Out of that in the last part of that book, we tried to pull it all together. What does this all add up to? Basically, what it’s trying to identify was a kind of central tendency of all of these theoretical framers because we can see in general that they get heading in the same direction. This really reverts I should say to William James, who in his chapter on Mysticism, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, he says flat out that this is the chapter from which all others derive their light. In that chapter, he asserts, not uncontroversially, that the general tendency of all of these things that he’s talked about in that chapter is toward some kind of an idealistic metaphysics, one in which consciousness becomes the primary element constituent of reality. In chapter 14 of Beyond Physicalism, I attempted to do this, tracing the trajectory of William James. William James, in 1897, gave the Ingersoll lecture at Harvard and this is where he formally introduced the idea of the so-called filter or transmission theory. He did it in pretty much the same kind of psychological terms that I used. But he also has a long footnote in which he says, well, I’ve been speaking here from the conventional sort of dualistic standpoint in which there are minds and bodies, but I do begin to see possibilities for going beyond that to a more radical kind of metaphysics, in which there was really just one underlying stuff of some sort. Well, the whole, this was in 1902 I guess when he gave those lectures. The rest of his career, he died in 1910, the main parts of it are his late metaphysical work, and a book called A Pluralistic Universe, in which, and it’s that book that I particularly keyed in on in this chapter in Beyond Physicalism because there he elaborated on the model that he had used in The Varieties of Religious Experience. He says very clearly, by the way, in several places, that he is using the psychological model of FWH Myers to explain all these different religious phenomena. This is the best-selling psychology book of all time, but hardly anybody even notices that anymore. The key thing for James about Myers’ theory was that Myers specifically proposes that our everyday consciousness is not all the consciousness there is within us. That that consciousness is embedded within a larger consciousness, which has what he calls,”adits and operations” of its own that has higher capabilities. James used that to explain the various phenomena in VRE, but in this later book, he carries it much further. The idea is well, Myers has generated empirical evidence supporting that possibility. of higher and higher integrations of consciousness associated with a single organism. By the way, I’ve realized here that I left out one chapter in Irreducible Mind which is rather important. It’s one on a secondary personalities and centers of consciousness, psychological automatisms. That was written by a guy named Adam Crabtree who has a long history of involvement with that particular subject. He’s a therapist who deals with multiple personality patients, that sort of thing. There are a number of cases in that literature which show clearly, and this is the main kind of evidence that James himself relied upon along with mystical experience, that in some cases, there is not only the everyday personality A but a hidden one or more hidden personalities. Let’s say just one, B. Such that B is aware of most of what goes on and A, but not vice versa. Furthermore, B may be a lot more competent person than A and they operate concurrently sometimes. That is, B can report things that are going on in A. All these things are extremely difficult to reconcile with a conventional brain theoretic approach to the mind, or personality. James is building on that picture in A Pluralistic Universe. He reviews a number of cases like Fechner, his favorite, Fechner, a fantastic character in the history of the subject, mainly known now for inventing the field of psychophysics. He was a physicist and a psychologist who had mystical experiences of his own, that profoundly shaped his view of how reality must be put together.

Ed Kelly: Anyway, James imagines a hierarchy of such integrations. But in contrast with the idealists of his day, he’s mainly talking in response to people like Bradley and Royce, his colleague Royce, and various other idealists of the late 19th century, early 20th, when it was the main philosophical position. It was about to be pushed aside by physicalism. But at that time, it was the reigning champion of metaphysics. There are things about it that James really doesn’t like. He doesn’t like there being a highest integration that knows everything because if it knows and accounts for everything, then it’s also responsible for evil, and he doesn’t want that responsibility for his idea of a God. He wants it to be way way above us, but incomplete itself and having some kind of a growing edge or environment that can help deal with that problem, among other things. He wants us to be more like us so that we can have kind of personal intimacy with it. Anyway, I commend that book to you. It’s a wonderful book, published a year before he died. Using that book and bringing to bear all the various positions that we canvassed in Beyond Physicalism, we arrived at a pretty clear-cut central tendency which amounts to what is called evolutionary panentheism. For those who aren’t familiar with his theological talk, and I certainly am not a professional theologian, but the basic ideas are, traditional theology as in the Abrahamic faiths. You have a God who sort of gets everything going, creates everything and then stands apart from it, might intervene either regularly or occasionally. Pantheism, historically, was the main competitor in which God has identified with the world. Panentheism, it’s intermediate between those two in the sense that, yes, God, which it takes as some kind of super higher consciousness is present in all things, but there’s something leftover, more or less than the same relationship to manifest creation as we are in relation to our bodies. Our agreement on this is certainly not unanimous, but it’s definitely the kind of majority view among the members of the SURSEM group, and that’s for survival seminar. That’s the name of the group that Mike Murphy convened back in 1998. I should say that these books are really the collective product of all the people who’ve been associated with that. I took the lead as a writer and editor and so on, but there have been, I never actually counted them, but something on the order of about 50 people from various disciplines including psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, psychiatry, history of science, physics, so it’s an extremely diverse group. One of the kinds of problems that we had to overcome going along is learning how to talk to each other because we inhabit such utterly different divergent conceptual worlds, but we succeeded in that, I think, to a considerable degree in these books. They’re not like typical edited books in which uncoordinated statements from people who don’t seem to have had anything to do with each other. I’m proud of that. Now the most recent book kind of continues the themes of both previous ones, Consciousness Unbound. It’s got empirical chapters, one on rebirth cases by Jim Tucker, one on NDEs by Bruce, one by a guy named Bob Rosenberg on pre-cognition which is really a remarkable chapter, I must say. Then it’s got five additional, either updates or a whole new conceptual framework, some by new people in our cast of characters here. Max Velmans is a very well-known guy in the world of consciousness studies. A guy I’m especially interested in I must say, Federico Faggin. You may have heard of him.

Rick Archer: I was just listening to him this morning. One of those Galileo commission webinars that you were part of.

Faggin, Kastrup, and a Shifting Scientific Tide

Ed Kelly: Federico, of course, is one of the major pioneers of contemporary microelectronics, starting back in the 1960s and 70s. But he also began having profound mystical experiences about 30 years ago. He was trained as a physicist, of course and believed it for most of his, or the major part, of his adult life. But these experiences convinced him that physics itself needs to be kind of rebuilt from the ground up in a way that incorporates consciousness at a fundamental level. He’s got a chapter in this book devoted to that. He’s working now with an Italian physicist, a theoretical physicist, named D’Ariano, developing the model. They’re working on a joint model now which combines Federico’s ideas about the primacy of consciousness with D’Ariano’s ideas about how you can derive both quantum theory and classical physics from even more fundamental informational type principles. This is deep stuff, and I can’t pretend to understand it very well, but if they succeed, they will essentially drain physics of its traditional physical content in favor of a thoroughgoing idealism. I think that’s the nature of the game, basically. These guys, whoa, they are two high powered dudes. Keep an eye out on that front. One of the things that we had noted in Irreducible Mind is that Myers is theory is very much structurally like the theory of Carl Jung. Except for the fact that Jung’s consciousness, Jung’s unconscious, is relentlessly unconscious. Unlike Myers’ they play a similar role in the two theories. But whereas Myers’ unconscious is actually a larger consciousness to which the everyday consciousness doesn’t normally have access. For Jung, the unconscious really is dark and unconscious. He talks about mystical experience as the regular consciousness being flooded with this dark stuff and dimming and all that. It’s a totally inappropriate description of mystical experience. Whereas in Myers theory and the kind of theory that we elaborated beyond physicalism it’s perfectly natural for consciousness to expand and become more intense in the ways that people who have these experiences say, so all that’s good, I think, for our point of view. Anyway, there’s another chapter in Consciousness Unbound, which bears down on that difference between Myers and Jung and finds that Jung was actually in his latest work following his own near-death experience, moving very clearly in the direction of a Myers-James-like theory and toward, in fact this guy Roderick Main is a very well-known Jung scholar, explicitly argues that Jung was on the verge of embracing evolutionary panentheism as his kind of official final metaphysical position. So that’s another contribution. Then there’s a man named Bernardo Kastrup, a very interesting guy, computer engineer by training, worked at CERN, a very high-level guy.

Rick Archer: I’ve interviewed Bernardo a couple of times.

Ed Kelly: He’s had mystical experiences of his own under different conditions, which again, led him to kind of rethink things from the ground up, and he’s basically now doing this full time. He’s abandoned his engineering career, an enormously productive guy, he’s written a bunch of very interesting, good books about why idealism is preferable to physical, why materialism is baloney. That was one of the first, and he writes very well. He’s got a chapter in our book too. That’s the kind of basic story of what we have accomplished over the last 20 odd years. I do see signs in the larger sort of academic world, increasing dissatisfaction with physicalism. Harald Atmanspacher, for example, and a philosophical acquaintance of his go to lots of philosophy of mind meetings, and they sense that in that world, particularly in the younger members of the philosophy of mind community, people are really more interested now in finding alternatives to physicalism than in fighting battles about it. Even in neuroscience, the emergence of integrated information theory is championed by Christof Koch. Christof Koch, I’m not sure how it’s pronounced, the main disciple of Francis Crick, in his books promoting integrated information theory has come right out and adopted a somewhat limited pan psychism in which consciousness is fundamental. It’s a property of the universe as fundamental as spin and charge and mass and stuff like that. Change is really in the air I think for the first time in my career.

Change is really in the air I think for the first time in my career.

Ed Kelly: Always a little guarded about these kinds of things. William James himself said back in 1890, something, the scientific world will have to pay attention to these things. Conversations about philosophy of mind can no longer be the same, but they stayed the same for another 100 years. It’s a little hard to read these changes in the zeitgeist. An inflection point in cultural history isn’t as sharply defined as one in a mathematical function. This inflection point has been spread out over decades, but I really do have the sense that the culture is changing. Something’s in the wind, that more scientists I think are starting to take, realize that they need to take seriously some of these rogue phenomena that challenge the prevailing physicalist viewpoint. It has plenty of cultural defenders however, and certainly the availability of a better worldview doesn’t imply either that it will become generally accepted or that, if accepted, it would be utilized in the, anything like an optimum way. So, that sense is that good things are in the works. But there’s a long road to travel still.

Rick Archer: Wow. Well, that was a great overview. That was probably the least amount that I’ve talked during at least the first hour interview I’ve ever done. But you were saying such great stuff. I just didn’t want to trip you up. It was such a wonderful synopsis of all of your work. If anyone followed all that, I think they would learn a lot and it would give them a lot of breadcrumbs to follow, in order to find out a heck of a lot more about these things.

Psilocybin and the Default Mode Network

Ed Kelly: The real basic thing here is that for people who are interested in personal transformation there is now a serious scientific foundation for what you’re trying to do. It’s going to get stronger because meditation is now a subject of real interest. In its current form it’s really kind of peculiar the way it’s evolved because meditation research has legitimized itself by coupling itself to public health, and thereby accessing the conventional funding mechanisms for research. It is inevitable, in my opinion, I mean, a lot of the stuff that’s been done, quite frankly, is pretty low level, uninteresting stuff. Mike Murphy jokes about meditation for hemorrhoids and that sort of thing. But it is inevitable, in my opinion, that we are going to come into contact with the deeper regions of the subject, and that’s when things really get interesting. There’s already been some I mean, Richie Davidson and company at Wisconsin doing neuroimaging studies with these super-duper Buddhist meditators. I hope there will be a lot more work of that sort. I think it’s already show things that are shocking to neuroscientists. There’s plenty to learn there, and it could be very practically useful to people who are getting interested in meditation and interested in self transformation. The other big area to watch by the way, is psychedelic research. Psychedelic neuro imaging research is well underway. I mean, it’s certainly still very early stage, but it’s already shown things that have been totally shocking to neuroscientists. In particular, there were a bunch of studies back in the 90s using psilocybin given orally and using PET, Positron Emission Tomography, as the imaging technology, and that basically seemed to confirm what most people expected. That is, if you’re having these intense psychological states, there must be something unusually intense physiologically going on. Those studies seem to support that. There was a lot of activity, excess activity in a bunch of areas including frontal cortical areas. However, in 2012, a study appeared by a group in England that used injected psilocybin together with two kinds of functional magnetic resonance imaging, which has much better temporal and spatial resolution. The results of that study just flabbergasted people because there were no increases in activity anywhere in the brain. Instead, you saw lots of decreases especially in a very interesting component of the brain, called the default mode network, which has come to be viewed as kind of the neural instantiation of your everyday self or ego. Basically, in this study, and it’s been confirmed by a number of subsequent studies, that system basically got taken apart. Activity was reduced, coupling reduced among the major nodes of that system. The amount of that kind of effect correlated with the intensity of the experience. That you see is, I mean, that’s very consistent with the kind of picture we talked about earlier, where you do something, whatever it is, and there may be many ways to do these things. Some kind of conditions occur in the brain that allow these higher states to penetrate into everyday consciousness. We can learn lots more about those.

Rick Archer: The filtering idea that, and what you’re saying is that there was a reduction of activity in the default mode network, which means the attenuation of ego perhaps, which all the spiritual traditions talk about and that allowed a much greater expansion of consciousness than would otherwise have been taking place.

Ed Kelly: Meditation and psychedelic research, I think, is going to carry us in the direction of experimental study of meditative states and lead to eventually improve ways of inducing these kinds of states. Stabilizing them.

Rick Archer: Of course, such research has been going on for 50 years. Some of it is crap, like you said, but a lot of it is very significant and more and more and more has been accumulating over these decades. There’s obviously something going on. I mean, one thing that comes to mind as you speak of all this is that the only way a person could adamantly deny the kinds of things you’re talking about is if they had simply not looked at the research. The Galileo commission is so named because Galileo’s contemporaries refused to look through his telescope because what he claimed he was seeing clashed with their religious worldview. I was kind of also thinking of Thomas Kuhns book as you were talking, you know, Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I don’t know if he said this because it was decades ago that I read it, but it seems to me that the more fundamental a paradigm, the more deep a paradigm or well entrenched, the greater the anomalies it would take to shake it and eventually usurp it. The physicalism paradigm is very fundamental in our culture and has been for a long time. So, by rights, it should have already been seriously shaken if not overturn given all the evidence that you just outlined, but it hasn’t been. Maybe it’s shaking, but as you’ve just said, it was Max Planck, who said that science progresses through a series of funerals and so it was encouraging that you said that a lot of younger people are not buying into that physicalist paradigm anymore and are open to exploring these things, and perhaps even within our lifetimes, it’ll flip.

Ed Kelly: I certainly hope so. I think we’re in a race against time basically to change our worldview and change our ways of doing things culturally. Or we’re going to destroy ourselves.

I think we’re in a race against time basically to change our worldview and change our ways of doing things culturally. Or we’re going to destroy ourselves.

Rick Archer: Yeah, now that might not be obvious to people. I feel very strongly that also. We have so many problems in the world. We hear about them in the news and climate change and so many other things. There are any number of things which could do us in. I don’t think most people have ever pondered the connection between those and the kinds of things you’ve been discussing. They might consider it a bit of a stretch to suggest that if we begin to explore consciousness, then somehow the climate situation will be resolved or all these other problems. How would you explain the causal connection there, if there is one?

Ed Kelly: I hesitate to get into this area, because I’m certainly no cultural historian or anything like that. There are a bunch of books out there that explore these themes though. What I should do, maybe I’ve got a list of them somewhere. I could try to send you that. But to take one example, and it’s kind of fundamental to the spiritual traditions. If physicalism is true, and we’re encased in our skulls, and there’s no other connection among us and what we can affect in ordinary conversation and physical interactions and so on, then, it’s hard to establish a kind of community-oriented ethics or ethos. But, if the alternative spiritual view of things is correct, and that we are all ultimately connected at this most fundamental level of a great consciousness from which we all emerge, then in harming you. I’m harming myself. The Golden Rule emerges naturally from that kind of a cosmology. Imagine if it can be scientifically established. I think we’re really quite close to doing that. That is a better picture of how things really are. Then would we treat each other better with that knowledge and want to treat the planet better knowing that we’re all passengers on this thing? And it’s, we know a lot more about it now from the vantage point of space. Maybe that kind of an ethos can really take hold and become effective in people’s lives.

The Golden Rule emerges naturally from that kind of a cosmology.

Rick Archer: Another way of thinking about it is we could consider pretty much everything that we see in the world as a creation or reflection or manifestation of human influence and human effort. It’s fair to say I think that the quality of the world, politics, economics, environment, health, so many different things. Is a simple reflection of the predominant mindset of humanity, which in itself is a collection of all the individual mindsets of humanity. A simple analogy, if a forest looks like it’s pretty much gray and dead, it’s because every individual tree is, and you can’t really make the forest healthy without somehow making each individual tree healthy. Then when you do that, then overall the forest will begin to appear healthy. Somehow or other enough individual human beings if their consciousness begins to awaken or enliven, there will be a more collective awakening and not just because of the individual numbers showing up as the case would be with trees. I think because, and I’ve heard you talking about this, or one of your writers talked about this in one of your books, that the deeper you go, the more collective consciousness becomes. So as with waves you go down to the root of the wave and it’s all one ocean, all the individual waves are expressions of it. I think that there’s something to the idea that as individual consciousness develops, that doesn’t just benefit the individuals, but it enriches the whole field, or to use the forest analogy it makes the ground of the forest more fertile for all the trees.

Ed Kelly: That’s certainly the hope. I’m limited by background and temperament to doing the kind of stuff that I do, but I feel that there’s a lot there, and I would really like to somehow energize for the work along those lines to draw out these kinds of connections and make them palpable and convincing to people.

Rick Archer: All right, let me ask you a couple of questions that have come in from guests. First, here’s one from my good friend Curtis Mayou. He lives in Virginia also, but I think he’s in the DC area. How do we distinguish between ineffable experiences when they are described afterward? The language used to describe them is too imprecise to distinguish between a meditation induced feeling of oneness wholeness, versus a psychedelic experience that might be described using the same words.

Mystical Experience and the Psychedelic Question

Ed Kelly: Well, these are good and difficult questions. I’m not sure how best to answer them. But a guy who is particularly important in this connection is Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins University. He has just managed to create a whole new center for psychedelic research. I forget the exact title of it, but you can easily find it. He did about 2006 published a replication of what was called the Good Friday experiment, back in the 60s, and I think already established even for people who were skeptical of it previously, that under appropriate conditions, real mystical experiences can be had using psychedelics that are indistinguishable phenomenologically from spontaneous, mystical experiences. There’s a lot of literature about this particularly back in the 60s and 70s, during that time of ferment when Tim Leary was ascendant and giving psychedelics a bad reputation, basically stimulating some bad legislation prevented further research on the stuff. There were a number of people, particularly from the side of religious studies, who took exception to the idea that you could have a real mystical experience by swallowing a pill or something of that sort. R. C. Zaehner in particular was one of those, but I think we’re to the point now where well it’s probably true that most psychedelic experiences aren’t very profound at all. They’re more superficial, sensory and cognitive kinds of stuff. Under the right conditions, real mystical experiences can definitely occur. Now, the other thing I wanted to say immediately in response, and, sure I’m not covering all dimensions of this question, the literature of what’s called apophatic mysticism, the negative way, talks about mystical experiences being empty of ordinary kinds of cognition and thinking and so on, verbal stuff and all that. In fact, a lot of training for mystical experience involves attempting to eliminate that kind of stuff from what’s going on in your experience. But, what results when you’re successful in \”emptying your mind\” is not emptiness because these deep mystical experiences even the introverted type in which there’s no contact of any kind with the world outside, but just one pointed introvertive consciousness. It’s not empty, but strangely full, a vacuum and a plenum. The guy who was, I think, especially good about that was Walter Stace back in 1960. He published his book Mysticism and Philosophy. He took a lot of abuse subsequently from the community of scholars of religion, notably Katz, Steven Katz, who have emphasized differences among traditions, in terms of their teachings and so on, and probably their mystical experiences as well. Even though people aren’t able to describe later on exactly what it was that happened, they can point to it by saying, and many of these people say, I can’t possibly describe what happened to me, but then they write a huge book or a series of books. Jacob Boehme, being a prime example, who wrote, I don’t know how many books describing his experience, and we know a good bit about them. There’s a family of related experiences. Stace was particularly interested in this introverted type because he thought he could argue from that to the basic Brahman and Atman picture that there has to be ultimately only one consciousness, empty consciousness because the argument from indiscernibles, if there’s nothing that can distinguish two experiences, then they are the same experience, and therefore all experiences are introverted consciousness were experiences of a single great consciousness. That’s a breathtaking argument that probably can’t quite hold together. But it may be the truth of the matter. The other big class that has been studied less is the extroverted type in which a world is still present but infused. This is a cosmic consciousness kind of experience described by people like Buck, Richard Maurice Bucke and Edward Carpenter. Plotinus. Well, Plotinus is more of an introverted mystic. Oh, by the way, I want to mention my co-editor, Paul Marshall. You’d be interested in this. Paul Marshall is another example of an interesting fact about our SURSEM group. We’ve had maybe 50 people in this group. There are at least eight or 10 of them whose entire careers have been shaped by mystical experiences of their own, either from early childhood or more recently, and the probability of that happening by chance is essentially zero. That’s another good example of how these things impact people and shape their lives. Anyway, Paul is another example. He was a physics student at Cambridge, who had a couple of mystical experiences, one of which in particular really impressed him. He I would say, has spent the rest of his life so far, and he’s relatively young guy, trying to figure out what happened to him. One other thing I should say in this context, I’m part of a group now that’s intensively studying a book by a man named Tim Eastman. This book is called Untying the Gordian Knot. Tim Eastman is a, he’s actually a plasma physicist, works mainly on space and that sort of stuff in his scientific career. But he starts this book by describing a mystical experience that he had as a young kid living on a farm in northern Minnesota. A piece of land adjacent to what used to be Lakota Indian territory. This thing happened to him, and he was blown away by it at the time, and I think it’s fair to say that he spent the rest of his life when not in his day job trying to figure out what happened. This book is an attempt to address that question. He is sort of approaching the same kinds of phenomena that we catalogued in Irreducible Mind. He takes psi phenomena seriously, has had a couple of experiences of his own of that sort, takes mystical experiences very seriously. When he talks about creativity, he even pulled out the same example that we did in our chapter on that, namely, Ramanugen, the Indian mathematician, who without any formal training recapitulated the entire history of Western math and carried it about a century forward in some areas. But the way he goes about it is wow, ever so different from the way we did, because of his background, which is all physics and math and logic and so on. It turns out, I had no inkling of any of this stuff, well a little bit on the physics side, but, he sort of pulls together a whole bunch of developments in those areas, to argue that we must revise our concept of reality in several ways, but in particular, by acknowledging that there is a whole dimension of reality, normally hidden to us, which corresponds to what Heisenberg described as potentials or potentiae, a world of possible things that interacts with the actual world in ways that he tries to elaborate and causes the things that do happen to happen. His way and our way of approaching the subjects are very different. But what I’m working with him now to try and flesh out more is ways of building bridges between that opening that he creates through this very technical kind of background, and our way of approaching it through successively more integrated states of consciousness.

Real mystical experiences can be had using psychedelics that are indistinguishable phenomenologically from spontaneous, mystical experiences.

Rick Archer: I just wanted to comment on the emptiness fullness thing. A few other points you made. Inner mystical experience could be regarded as empty because it’s devoid of the concrete objects of perception that we usually have. But, when you’re having such an experience, it definitely doesn’t feel empty. There’s a fullness of bliss of expansion, or a sense of omnipresence. There’s sometimes a feeling of knowingness or all knowingness, and so on. Then, the next thing you said about that external version of that, is I think perhaps usually subsequent to having had enough clear, deep internal experiences such as I just described. What those do to you is eventually infuse into your whole mind body system such that you begin to see the essential nature of everything all around you, as you interact with it, receive it. Then, that’s where the quality of unity can come in, because you can be looking at something and in seeing its essential nature, which is identical to your own essential nature, which you have already explored you find that you and the thing, are one. There’s an experience of unity.

Ed Kelly: I don’t want to be too personal about it, but are you speaking from personal experience here or from reading the literature?

Rick Archer: Well, I’ve been meditating for 54 years, a couple hours a day. A lot of it is derived from my personal experience, but I don’t consider that to be complete by any means. I’m a work in progress. But, I’ve had pretty clear tastes of the things I’m saying,

Ed Kelly: I envy you. I envy all of my colleagues who have had these kinds of experiences. William James talked about having a mystical germ but no real experiences of his own. As close as he got was with nitrous oxide.

Rick Archer: This is better than nitrous oxide, I’m sure. Although laughter can accompany it. Then this other thing you said, forget whether this was from Eastman or not, and ties into Kashmir Shaivism also, is that this foundational level of creation, or reality or consciousness or whatever we want to call it, is definitely not an emptiness because it contains within it the potentialities for the whole universe to manifest. It could really rather be thought of as a field of all possibilities, a phrase a Deepak likes to use, or just a sort of a plenum of energy, intelligence, creativity, which bursts forth as the tremendous variety and complexity of creation.

Ed Kelly: Mike Murphy jokes about how the Ramakrishna Vedanta school is the up and out school, kind of takes the view that the world we live in is ultimately unreal, and that your job is to get out of here as fast as possible and into the infinite bliss and all that. Whereas the more Tantric wing of Hindu philosophy which Kashmiri Shaivism really is. Aurobindo had a lot to do with Mike’s introduction to that whole subject. The experience world is real, it’s just that reality is much bigger than just that.

Rick Archer: A lot of these debates can be resolved by looking at life as multi layered. There’s a dimension at which nothing ever happened, and there’s a dimension at which all kinds of stuff is happening, but it’s perfect just as it is. There’s a dimension at which a lot of things are happening and they’re not perfect and they need to be improved. All those things can be simultaneously true.

Ed Kelly: This is where the whole subject gets puzzling.

Rick Archer: There’s a good corollary with what physics tells us. It seems like an object like this pen is really solid, and then there’s a level at which it’s just molecules, and there’s no evidence of anything pen like. Then there’s an atomic level of which there’s no evidence of anything molecular, and so on and so forth. You can’t say that just because subatomic particles or quarks and electrons are the ultimate reality that the pen doesn’t exist. In a sense it doesn’t but in at least in an apparent sense, it does. There’s another related question related to Curtis’s question, which a mutual friend of Curtis’ and mine often poses, Tom Christofi, who has been on BatGap. That is, he often argues that, well, let’s say you’re meditating and have an experience of unboundedness and you feel you’ve gotten down to the real nitty gritty of creation. How do you know that consciousness really is unbounded and extends infinitely and is not confined by your six-foot frame? Or, you’re just having an experience in which it really feels like it’s that, but that’s just being created by your brain? And, it has nothing to do with what consciousness actually is?

Ed Kelly: Now, this gets back to the treatment of mystical experience by contemporary science, which is mostly to ignore it, but among the very few who’ve paid any attention to it the overwhelming tendency has been to devalue, and pathologize it on grounds that it’s just some aberrant brain activity and that’s what’s going on. James in Varieties of Religious Experience, again, kind of set the temper for most people’s response to it, which is to say that these experiences are typically totally compelling and convincing for those who have them, but they’re not sufficient to compel the rest of us to accept their view of things. I think James actually understated the possibilities here for scientifically justifying the underlying metaphysics. For example, in that audience, he was not so willing to talk about the relationship between mystical experience and psi phenomena. I mean, if your mystical experience tells you that something happened yesterday in a remote location, and that turns out to be true, that’s a piece of evidence that supports the reality and the evidential importance of your mystical experience. Similarly, a lot of the great geniuses of world intellectual traditions have also had mystical experiences that have opened them up in some way. These are empirical kinds of findings that support the reality of the experiences, and I think that connection remains to be developed much more fully by scientists and historians and scholars of religion. So, you certainly have to be careful constantly and not presume that you know that little voice in your head is the ultimate preparing you to save suffering humanity from its struggles. There’s quite a big literature of the sort of prophetic type mediumship, or people who have been opened up to teachings about different departments of reality. Look, the Course in Miracles is a modern one, but there’s stuff of this sort going way back a couple of centuries even. As you can imagine, it certainly would be very seductive, to be told that you are to be the vehicle for communicating these great teachings to a suffering world. If that sort of thing happens, I think you have to be extremely careful about it. I mean, we have to be careful all the time about taking experiences at face value. The same is true in the whole world of parapsychology and psychical stuff. As interesting as it is, it’s got a about as a high a ratio of noise to signal as things like diet and politics, let’s say. It behooves everyone who gets involved with it to be very careful of this influence.

Rick Archer: This point about being the vehicle there’s a nice quote from your book, which to me implies that in a sense, where all the vehicles, or all of us are vehicles. “If the entire universe presses to manifest its latent divinity, then we must share that impetus, which is evident in our desire for the illuminations, self-existent, delight, self-surpassing love and sense of eternal freedom and identity we experience in our highest moments.” I think this quote was elaboration on evolutionary panentheism that there’s just this divine impulse or trajectory, which I regard as the ultimate driving force between the creation of the universe. Brian Swimme famously said, you leave hydrogen alone for 13 point 7 billion years and you end up with rose bushes, giraffes and opera. There is just this evolutionary momentum or trajectory or tendency or impulse, which has given rise to greater and greater complexity to the point where beings such as we exist and probably greater than we, who can discuss these things, not only discuss them, but turn around and experience that field of intelligence from which all this has arisen.

Ed Kelly: What you quoted was from Mike Murphy’s final chapter in Beyond Physicalism where he portrays evolutionary panentheism as a what he calls a stealth worldview, that it’s been around for a long time. It comes out of the Southeast Asian philosophical traditions. It was present in Neo Platonism and Fachina and company in the early Renaissance, in the German idealists of the 18th and 19th century, so it keeps resurfacing. It’s been suppressed again in the modern era with the rise of physicalism, but that’s not because anybody ever proved that this was an incorrect view of things. It’s just that physicalism seems so successful, and it proves lots of goodies for human use, and a lot of people mistake those goodies for evidence of the correctness of the philosophy. That’s where the big mistake crept in. People like Russell and Moore, who claim to have refuted idealism basically said, hey, we all need this. But what else we got that work so well. It was pretty much sum and substance of their arguments. But I think we are at the point now, where this kind of a picture is surfacing again, and very importantly, it’s not surfacing purely from the religious and philosophical side, but from the scientific side as well. I think that may be the decisive added ingredient that allows it to finally get the kind of respect that it deserves as a much better picture of the ultimate nature of things.

Rick Archer: I’ve never been a formal student of the history and philosophy of science, but as I understand it, prior to the advent of the scientific method, there were a lot of weird ideas floating about many of them enforced even with the death penalty by the church. Science was a welcome corrective of that situation in which we could insist upon empirical evidence and collective confirmation of evidence found so it wasn’t just one person’s subjective, arbitrary anecdotal experience. But somehow or other we’ve ended up it seems to me, not we, but the general assumption in the world that science is the be all and end all. It doesn’t get any better than that. If it doesn’t fit into the model of science, it’s not worthy of consideration. But maybe it can get better than that. Or maybe science itself can evolve to be a bigger basket, specifically with the kind of things we’re talking about. Can these realities which apparently can only be explored through deep subjective experience fit within the realm of scientific investigation? Or is subjective experience just too variable because we all have different nervous systems, and we might all be practicing different techniques. I suppose this has been a problem even with psychology. Maybe that’s why BF Skinner held sway for a while with behaviorism. We’re talking about realities that can’t be measured with a physical instrument necessarily. You can measure the correlates of them by EEG or whatever, but you can’t really measure what the person is experiencing. But that doesn’t mean that their experience is unreal or less important or anything. To sum it up, to what extent do you think that the mystical realm, if we want to call it that, can be amenable to the scientific method?

Ed Kelly: I think we can do a lot better in terms of scientific study of mysticism. Psychology has always existed in this sort of no man’s land between the humanities and hard science. If you go back to the beginnings of behaviorism William James was, his body was practically still warm when James D. Watson published his behaviorist manifesto. If you go back and read that thing today, it’s astonishing that it had the impact that it had. I mean, that became the reigning dogma for the next 50 years in American psychology, certainly experimental psychology. I can remember. I sat in on a class taught by Noam Chomsky in 1964 or 5 over at MIT on Cartesian linguistics. Somehow in the course of that, there were about 200 people in the room of whom maybe six were taking the course for credit. The rest of us, we’re just there to sit at Chomsky’s feet, the guy is absolutely unreal. Anyway, somebody asked this question about behaviorism, and he got real quiet for a moment and he said, in my opinion, the first 50 years of American experimental psychology will go down as a footnote in the history of science. We’re talking about the activity of 1000s of people over decades, but he was right. I mean, that’s basically what’s happened since then. It’s shocking because the whole point of behaviorism was to make consciousness unsuitable as a subject for polite scientific conversation. There’s also a big movement now, I should say, stimulated really by the advent of these neuro imaging techniques to improve our methods for describing and maybe quantifying or characterizing subjective experience. I think we are gradually learning how to do those things better. I’m not going to speculate anything about ultimate limits, but I do believe we can do way better than we have so far in terms of scientific approaches to things like mystical and psychedelic experiences. To correlate those you see with what’s going on physiologically, contrary to what you might think, from what you see in the popular literature, pictures of brains or little colored spots and all that sort of thing. We are at a point now, where the imaging community is really straining to understand what’s important about neural activity in relationship to mental activity, and how to measure that. There’s an enormous amount of work going on at the frontiers of these disciplines. In my area, for example, EEG research, you might be recording 128 channels of EEG, producing enormous amounts of data, but what do you do with that data? What do you measure in it that you expect to correlate meaningfully with the subjective experience side of things? We’re just beginning to learn how to do that stuff well. We’re on a steep part of what’s going to be a long learning curve, but I think a lot more can be done along those lines.

Rick Archer: If you could conjecture where the scientific enterprise might be at 100 years from now, or 200 years from now, taking into account both material, measurable things and mystical or spiritual experiences, do you think there will be a merging such that it’s just one body of knowledge with different tools or facets to it? Or do you think there will always be some kind of, what’s the word, schism between the two?

Ed Kelly: I believe we can already glimpse in outline, an improved science-based worldview that accommodates spiritual realities in a meaningful way, and, moreover, makes them accessible, both individually and culturally. I can’t do better than hope that something of that sort emerges because, like I said before, I think we don’t have much time to get this right or we’re going to destroy ourselves and everything else.

I believe we can already glimpse in outline, an improved science-based worldview that accommodates spiritual realities in a meaningful way.

Rick Archer: A good question that came in from Ivan Dimitroff. He wants to know, double-slit experiments confirm consciousness effector in reality. Do you incorporate quantum mechanics in your studies of consciousness?

Ed Kelly: The guy who’s done most with that is Dean Radin, who’s done and published a bunch of experiments.

Rick Archer: He’s been on BatGap twice.

Ed Kelly: The other person that I’ve been closest to is Henry Stapp, who was a quantum theorist, inventor of S matrix theory and stuff like that, who is very much on board with the kind of picture that I described as emerging at the end of Beyond Physical as he’s advanced, a picture of the mind brain interaction, which he thinks reconciles a kind of dualistic point of view with quantum mechanics. He is also very sympathetic privately to the idea of the realm of quantum potentials, potentiae, being thought of as a kind of, he thinks it’s more mental than physical in the traditional sense, is very comfortable privately with the idea of a big mind at the basis of all that happens, including both our experience, of ourselves, as separate individuals and also our shared experiences of a surrounding natural world. I mean, it has to be accounted for somehow, right? The big obstacle, certainly for me, and I think for a lot of people to moving toward idealism, is an argument you often get from physical. Even open-minded physical realists who are willing to acknowledge that they are having trouble explaining consciousness say, but look, you guys have exactly the opposite problem. You have to explain matter from consciousness. What I would like to propose to you is that that’s not quite right. There’s an asymmetry in the explanatory challenges to the physicalist and the idealist, because what the idealist has to explain, is not matter, as classically conceived. That’s part of the conceptual system that we elaborated over several centuries to explain a lot of things, which it does. It’s just that now we’re encountering some things that it seems unable to explain. What the idealist has to explain is not parts of that conceptual apparatus that we have previously tried to use to explain consciousness and so on, but to explain those regularities of experience for which we invented that apparatus. Not sure I said that very well. That’s exactly what people like Federico Faggin and Bernardo Castro are attempting to do, to basically understand how it could be that out of a cosmic consciousness comes both us as individuals, and the, mostly pretty much the same kind of worlds that we experience when we’re together. Stay tuned for that.

Kashmir Shaivism and an Ocean of Intelligence

Rick Archer: I always, you were talking about Vedanta a little while ago and how it seems to have an up and out orientation like, let’s get out here as quickly as possible. Whereas Kashmir Shaivism, kind of honors the material world more. In fact, there’s a quote from your book, I believe, somebody named Lorelai Bernanke. Gupta and his non dual Kashmir Shaivism, similar to Advaita Vedanta, but which takes a tantric or panentheistic turn that more explicitly embraces the everyday world as fully real, and the Siddhis as an important part of that world not to be belittled or ignored. As I move through my life, I’m constantly, I guess astonished you could say, by the intelligence that must, that is evident in every little thing. I often use the example, there’s actually a name for this, but if you took all the atoms in a gram of hydrogen and enlarged them to the size of unpopped popcorn kernels, they’d bury the continental United States nine miles deep, and that’s just one gram of hydrogen! We have this whole huge thing, and when you consider what that, the implications of that, every single one of those little atoms is this marvel of functioning that we don’t even fully understand, but it abides by certain laws of nature, and it displays orderliness and so on and so forth. I think the Kashmir Shaivist perspective would be that we are swimming in an ocean of intelligence which thoroughly pervades us, and we and that ocean are one and that it’s sort of too simplistic to write it off as just consciousness, plain vanilla consciousness, but without bringing in the intelligence factor, which you can equate with God if you want to. That’s the stuff that really fascinates me.

Ed Kelly: In the Indian tradition, they celebrate the idea of the Jivan Mukti, a person who was liberated in this life and an effective agent for improving things, and certainly, I mean, in the Catholic tradition, some of the great saints, mystics, Saint Teresa and John of the Cross, people like that, Ignatius, were engines of getting things done in this world. Maybe if we had a bunch more such people, we could start rapidly making improvements in our overall civilization and state of things.

Rick Archer: Let me look at some of these questions that Dana Sawyer sent in.

Ed Kelly: Hello Dana!

Rick Archer: He’s probably not watching right now, but he’ll watch this later. He’s been on BatGap a couple of times, old friend of mine. We’ve covered some of these. Filter theory, we’ve talked about. Let’s see. Near death experiences, we’ve talked about. Ian Stevenson, past lives. Here’s a good one. Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, and Stan Grof have all argued that much of the anxiety, neurosis, and depression in our society are directly caused by a frustrated desire to self-actualize, rather than only being due to repressed memories, fears and desires. In other words, we’re all frustrated because we have this incredible latent potential, and we’re not able to realize it or express it. What are your thoughts in that regard?

Ed Kelly: I think that’s the right way to think about it. One of the great advantages of the kinds of psychological pictures that I sketched before the Myers James view is that it clearly implies that we can gain access to these higher potentials by putting ourselves in suitable states. There’s every reason to believe that we know how to do research of kinds that will let us get better at understanding what those conditions are and eliciting them or stabilizing them in people who want to achieve, release those potentials so there’s, there’s an enormous applied aspect to this emerging picture. One that I think can be really helpful at many levels going forward. I don’t expect to do much of it myself, I’m right near the end of my career, but the door is open now to that kind of work.

Rick Archer: This relates to the notion that they say we use such a small percentage of our full potential, and we’re always blaming external circumstances or people for the shortcomings of life, this politician and that person there, and all. But, if it’s true that we’re only using a fraction of our full potential, then of course the world is going to be full of problems and difficulties. If the understanding that we have tremendous inner potential could be more commonplace and if methods for developing it, or unfolding it could be more commonplace, we would automatically see huge profound fundamental changes in the world.

Ed Kelly: Yeah, of course, that’s been the driving impulse of Mike Murphy and Esalen Institute for sixty years or whatever it is.

Rick Archer: Well, what you were saying earlier about, things seem to be heating up, the younger people and this person here and there, all kinds of people and the psychedelic renaissance and it’s on so many different fronts. Perhaps it gives us reason to be optimistic.

Ed Kelly: I do feel very optimistic about the long-term possibilities here if we can keep ourselves going long enough to realize that and, if I may, let me just insert a kind of self-serving observation here. We urgently need to find a replacement for me as head of our neuro imaging laboratory. This is my other hat. I sort of bracket the main line of Dobson’s work on two sides. One being this theory stuff that I got pressed into willy nilly through Esalen, but my other main duty is to run this lab and we’ve been very short handed. It’s a great facility. We need somebody who shares our kind of views of things and has the relevant capabilities to take over. Anybody out there who hears me say this and wants to inquire about it, go look at our website first of all, just DOPS, Google DOPS, UVA, you’ll go right there.

Rick Archer: I’ll link to it from your BatGap page.

Ed Kelly: Thank you. There’s an elaborate description of the lab itself, the research program, the history and so on, and rationale for what we’re trying to do. Anybody out there who thinks he or she is up for that, please contact me.

Rick Archer: Do you have like, you said you’re near the end of your career. What kinds of things are you still working on and what would you like to accomplish still?

Ed Kelly: I’d like to carry forward this theory project in the way I was talking about it with regard to Tim Eastman because that would combine the extreme technical rigor and sophistication of his approach with the more psychological characteristics of ours. I sense, although I can’t yet articulate, that there are good ways of building bridges between our two approaches. That’s one thing. That’s on the theory side. Then on the experimental side, I’ve long wanted to bring a guy out of retirement who was, well this is a person I met very early in my parapsychology career, about the first month after I arrived at the Rhine lab. This guy showed up who could do pretty much anything we asked him to do. And we published a bunch of papers with him, about him, at that time. I’d like to bring him back into the new lab because we can now do things we could only dream about doing in the old days, and it would be great to have him come back, do a spectacular ESP performance, and use our new EEG methods to predict success, trial by trial, in his performance on that task. That would be the sort of home run of my career experimentally speaking.

The Levitations of Joseph of Cupertino

Rick Archer: You have a chapter in your book entitled Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and the Siddhis which you co-wrote with Ian Witcher. I met Ian at the SAND conference, and we sat on the plane next to each other coming home from the conference. How does that fit into this whole conversation we’ve been having and everything you’ve been doing?

Ed Kelly: We portray Samkhya and yoga in that chapter as kind of steps toward Kashmir Shaivism, really or a version of Vedanta, that takes the actual as experienced as real, more real than the Ramakrishna Vedanta guys typically do. There’s a lot of debate about the degree of difference really between Vedanta as conceptualized by Shankara and the later forms, the Kashmiri forms. I don’t profess to be into that in any depth, but I think the differences are sometimes exaggerated by people who want to plug for Kashmiri Shaivism. In any case, that’s the role that that chapter played in Beyond Physicalism. But we chose it particularly because of Book Three, the Yoga Sutras, which deals explicitly with Siddhis and tried to make connections between Patanjali’s treatment of the subject there and various kinds of extreme Siddhis that occur in the context of Catholic mysticism. I’m not sure how much the audience knows about this, but the making of saints and Catholicism is a really big deal. It was put in a very kind of legalistic framework early on, by the guy who actually served as the sort of devil’s advocate in the proceedings for Joseph of Cupertino. Joseph of Cupertino was a 17th century Catholic saint who was observed levitating, not just occasionally and to a little degree, but dramatically in broad daylight, on hundreds of occasions by 1000s of people, witnesses, including skeptical and hostile witnesses who could not deny that what happened happened, even if they might differ in small details. about it. This guy would sometimes go up 30 yards and stay there for minutes, stuff like that. This is not subtle. Michael Jordan eat your heart out. Anyway, a buddy of Voltaire, I can’t think of his name at the moment, but he was the one who codified the procedures for these deliberations, which are much like trials in the modern secular sense, and they distinguished the quality of witnesses and of course people were obliged to testify under oath which, at that time in those circumstances, was taken very seriously. You lie about this stuff, and you go straight to the nether world when you have the misfortune to die. It’s a body of literature that I take quite seriously. You can’t deny this stuff without denying practically everything about human testimony.

Rick Archer: A friend of mine named Craig Pearson who’s also been on BatGap wrote a book about all the historical accounts of levitation that he could find from around the world. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of them. Of course, modern day skeptics would just say, well, you know, it’s just fairy tales. It’s the older version of Marvel comics or whatever. It would be really cool if we had at St. Joseph these days who could do that kind of thing because I mean, boy, talk about forcing people to change their paradigm. Physicists and others would have to really scramble to understand how in the heck such a thing could be. Firstly, they’d have to prove that it wasn’t some kind of David Copperfield illusion, but once that was settled, if someone could be seen levitating 30 feet in the air, 30 yards, whatever, and hovering up there, and there was no way it was fake, no wires, no strings. What does that mean about human consciousness? What does that mean about the law of gravity in relation to consciousness? Do the physical laws that govern the universe reside in consciousness in some ways, such that if one could master consciousness adequately, one could command those laws or cause them to behave differently? Interesting.

Ed Kelly: A couple of things. My friendly colleague Mike Grosso has written, well, he’s got two books about Joseph. One is called The Man Who Could Fly and that’s a summary of the evidence, and he finds related things in the mediumistic literature and so on and talks about all these issues about evidence. He’s also translated a biography of Joseph that was written in the early 18th century by the son of Bernini, the sculptor, a long commentary about that. The other thing I wanted to mention is just last year, sometime, I discovered, there’s an article by a historian of the early church and medieval church named Carlos Eire at Yale, who totally, independently of anything to do with psychic research, wrote a paper called The Good the Bad and the Airborne, which is specifically about Joseph and concludes that, hey, guys, we’ve got to face up to it. He flew. Definitely worth reading. It’s like Mike’s book, but in a more condensed form.

Rick Archer: It’s people who are very busy and are focused in their cubby hole of specialty to just, eh, not even going to spend the time to look at that. Couldn’t be. That’s it. I’ve heard from Dean Radin, very often, he gets that. Well, yeah, what you’re doing couldn’t be true, so I’m not going to look at it.

Ed Kelly: By the way, just to reinforce that point, let’s see, it was about 2018, I think colleague of ours, Etzel Cardena, published a very good paper in The American Psychologist, which is the flagship Journal of the American Psychological Association, summarizing several major lines of parapsychology research and meta-analyses that have been done of those. In the very next issue, supposedly, not as a deliberate attempt to rebut, there was an article by two psychologists who tried to argue that psi phenomena cannot occur because they violate the laws of nature. But get this, two psychologists pose as experts in what physics can allow, and not even recognizing the fact that a number of very prominent physicists have taken the subject very seriously. That’s kind of what we’re up against.

Rick Archer: To that, I would say airplanes can’t exist because they violate laws of nature at least as understood way back. It’s just means we don’t understand the laws of nature well enough.

Ed Kelly: I think it was Augustine somewhere in The City of God says something to the effect that miracles occur not in contradiction. to nature, but in contradiction to what is known to us of nature.

Miracles occur not in contradiction to nature, but in contradiction to what is known to us of nature.

Rick Archer: If Jesus really walked on water, for instance, I don’t think he violated laws of nature. He just utilized the laws of nature in a different way than we ordinarily can.

Ed Kelly: Yes. Interesting fact about Joseph by the way, that ought to be a clue, is that these levitations occurred only in the context of a sort of mystical ecstasy. He could be ecstatic without going up in the air, but he couldn’t go up in the air without being ecstatic. Henry Stapp, a physicist, well, this could get too complicated, but Henry tried to assimilate Joseph initially to his sort of standard theory about how we move our arms and so on, which involved how fast you can issue directives to invoke a thing called the Quantum Zeno Effect. His initial idea was that maybe in these ecstatic states, you can just do this much faster than normal and do bigger effects. But he eventually gave up on that approach.

He could be ecstatic without going up in the air, but he couldn’t go up in the air without being ecstatic.

Rick Archer: He wasn’t saying that Cupertino flapped his arms or something.

Ed Kelly: No, no, mentally wanting to go up in a much more intense kind of way and that’s what did it.

Rick Archer: I don’t know if he even wanted to. I haven’t read his biography, but I know with St. Teresa of Avila she also had levitation experiences. She didn’t want to, but she would get into the states where she would just, because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself or anything.

Ed Kelly: Joseph was the same way, a lot of them were spontaneous. There’s one funny one Mike talks about where the Pope or somebody was being visited by some Spanish official who brought his beautiful wife, and they were coming to meet Joseph and his superior. Joseph didn’t want to do that, but the spirit made him do it. This woman is approaching him, and he was very preoccupied with being careful about interacting with women and that sort of thing. As this woman approached, she’s suddenly let one of these shrieks, and he flew over the top of this group and landed on the other side and ran off.

Rick Archer: That’s really funny.

Ed Kelly: Things of that sort in the Joseph collection.

Rick Archer: ‘There’s more in Heaven and Earth Horatio than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ There’s a lot going on in the world that we don’t collectively appreciate yet, but hopefully, like you say, if we don’t do ourselves in, we will. I got an email from Dwayne Elgin the other day. Basically, he sent a file of, that some other guy had written with all the dire circumstances that humanity faces any one of which could do us in and yet he listed at least a dozen of them. I thought, oh, the poor guy. All those things are true, but if you don’t get that there’s an awakening of consciousness taking place in the world, then all hope is lost. You could easily get depressed and suicidal if you didn’t see that taking place.

Ed Kelly: It’s easy to get depressed these days for sure.

Rick Archer: All right. Well, thanks so much. I could talk to you for another two hours, but I think we probably both need to get to the bathroom. This has been really good, and I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed preparing for it. Keep up the good work and stay in touch. If there’s, if you feel like in a year or two from now, there’s a whole collection of points that we didn’t cover in this one that you’d like to cover, we can do another one.

Ed Kelly: Sure. If you have further questions, pass them on.

Rick Archer: I will. Alright, so thank you. Thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching, and as you know, this is an ongoing series, you might want to visit the website. There’s an upcoming interviews page which lists all the things we have scheduled.

Ed Kelly: I went there this morning actually saw that.

Rick Archer: Good. There are a bunch of other things. Explore the menus. It exists as an audio podcast if you like to listen to podcasts, and a bunch of other things.

Ed Kelly: Oh and send me the instructions about where to send the gear.

Rick Archer: I will. Alright, everybody, thanks so much. See you for the next one.

Ed Kelly: Thank you.

Rick Archer: Thanks, Ed.